Sex magic, occult art and acid: the story of the infamous witch of Kings Cross

In the 1960s she would have been celebrated by the counterculture – but a decade earlier, Rosaleen Norton was shunned and mocked

Norton with her painting The Adversary in 1949. Photograph: Fairfax Media

‘She was at the vanguard’: a new documentary about Rosaleen Norton is out now. 

Brigid Delaney THE GUARDIAN
Mon 8 Feb 2021 16.30 GMT

They didn’t quite burn witches in Australia in the 1940s and 50s, but they didn’t make it easy for them either.

Take Rosaleen Norton, an artist and self-identified witch who the tabloids called “the witch of Kings Cross”. She was repeatedly arrested, had her artwork burned and was shunned and mocked by society.

Norton eked out a modest living selling her art, and putting spells and hexes on people. Her story has been captured in a new documentary, released online on Tuesday.

Norton, who lived in Kings Cross in the postwar years until her death in 1979, had been fascinated with the occult since she was a child.

Ban on Aleister Crowley lecture at Oxford University – archive, 1930

Aged 23 and living away from her conservative family in a variety of lodgings and squats in the seedy Sydney suburb, she began to practise trance magic and, later, sex magic. The former involved invoking spells, rituals and taking substances with the aim of achieving a higher form of consciousness; the latter was popularised by the British occultist Aleister Crowley and involved having sex with multiple partners that invoked rituals similar to Tantra.

The fascinating story of Norton’s life may have been lost had it not been for the commitment of Sonia Bible to bring it to the screen. 

NOT TRUE NEVILLE DRURY WROTE A BIO OF HER

Made on a shoestring budget, and largely crowd- and self-funded, the documentary is a labour of love. The film-maker managed to track down several of Norton’s contemporaries before they died, and sourced diaries and artworks that were in private hands; she melds the historical documents with dramatic recreations (Norton is played by Kate Elizabeth Laxton).

Film-maker Sonia Bible says the woman dubbed the ‘witch of Kings Cross’ lived life on her terms and in her 60s was still dropping acid and making art

“When I started making the film, I knew this story was on the edge of living memory,” Bible says. “This would be the last film on the late 50s, because the people have died. The oral history of people who were there – that has gone now.”

She came across Norton’s story in the tabloid papers, while researching 2011’s Recipe for Murder – another documentary set in postwar Sydney.

“It was a time of great social change,” Bible says. “A dark noir time before pointy cars and rock’n’roll, but in the lead-up to the counterculture.

‘If she had been launching herself in the 1960s, 

with the counterculture and feminism in full swing, 

she would have been like Brett Whiteley’: 

Bacchanal by Rosaleen Norton. Photograph: Burgess family

All her life, Norton combined her interest in the occult with art. Her paintings, some of which were seized by police and burned, could loosely be defined as esoteric: canvases often filled with hectic images of women embracing the Greek god Pan, snakes and horned demons.

Australia in the postwar years was almost 90% Christian, and Norton was made a target for her beliefs. Surveillance and raids from the vice squad, and seizure of her work, criminalised her, and turned her into a notorious and shocking tabloid figure. One of her sex magic partners, the celebrated Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Eugene Goossens, was forced to flee Australia when his luggage at Sydney airport was found to contain pornography. The pair each suffered in their own way for transgressing the strict moral boundaries of the time.

“There was a rapid change in relationships between men and women, social conventions and politics,” Bible says. Right now we are also living in a time of great change, but when you are in it, you can’t analyse it.”

Photograph: News Ltd

Part of the tragedy of Norton’s story is that she was born too soon – in 1917. If she were alive now, there would be a whole community of witches to connect with on TikTok – but even being born 10 years later would have made a difference, according to Bible.

“If she had been launching herself in the 1960s, with the counterculture and feminism in full swing, she would have been like Brett Whiteley … She was at the vanguard and she did have an impact and inspired people. Young people went up to the Cross looking for her.”

But even though Norton’s life was hard, Bible cautions about viewing her with pity.

“She lived the life she wanted. She didn’t value money. She was very happy. She had her art and her religion. She lived life on her own terms and towards the end she had a flat in Kings Cross, given to her by the church.

“People felt sorry for her, this old woman living in the Cross with her cats. But in her 60s she was dropping acid and still making art. She was very happy.”

• The Witch of Kings Cross releases worldwide on 9 February on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo and GooglePlay; it will be in selected cinemas from 11 February

Church of Satan denounces Big Tech in hilarious tweet


By Sara Dorn
February 6, 2021 

"Big Tech does a lot of things. We can assure you, 'serving Satan' isn't one of them," The Church of Satan tweeted on Feb. 6, 2021.Shutterstock

Even Christians and Satanists agree — Big Tech is bad.

The Church of Satan is publicly distancing itself from Big Tech — on Twitter, naturally — after the CEO of the controversial social media company Gab claimed the industry is “serving Satan.”

“Big Tech does a lot of things. We can assure you, ‘serving Satan’ isn’t one of them,” The Church of Satan tweeted Saturday.

The hilarious declaration was made in response to a blog post by Gab CEO Andrew Torba earlier this week, in which he urged his followers to take part in a “silent Christian secession.”

“I am in the process of transitioning every part of my financial expenses to support Christian businesses, Christian media companies, Christian content creators, and Christian people,” Torba wrote, noting the site has been de-platformed by more than 25 service providers, including GoDaddy and Apple.

“Deeply examine the businesses, brands, and media companies you currently support both financially and with your time. If they are virtue signaling critical theory nonsense or owned by demons you should immediately stop paying them and using their services,” he wrote.

Gab was founded in 2016 and has become a haven for far-right provocateurs and extremists.

The site, which bills itself a “free-speech social network,” has reported a surge in users in recent weeks, after other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter booted former President Donald Trump and other prominent conservatives following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Books

'I’ve been called Satan': Dr Rachel Clarke on facing abuse in the Covid crisis

Critical care staff turn a Covid-19 patient on the Christine Brown ward at King’s College Hospital in London on 27 January. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images

As well as fighting to keep Covid patients alive, NHS staff are now battling a surge in abuse and denial in the second wave. Dr Rachel Clarke on how she is coping – and what gives her hope



Rachel Clarke
@doctor_oxford
Sat 6 Feb 2021 

Please imagine it, for a moment, if you can bear to. Being wheeled from your home by paramedics in masks who rush you, blue-lit, to a hospital. Then the clamour and lights, the confusion and fear, the faceless professionals, gloved and gowned, who eddy and swirl past your trolley. Your destination is intensive care where too soon, or perhaps not soon enough, you will arrive at a point of reckoning. You will blanch when they tell you, because you’ve watched the news and know what it signifies: you are going to be put on a ventilator. You will understand, as clearly as they do, that your doctors cannot promise to save you.

Here, though, is the detail that haunts me. For every patient who dies from Covid-19 in hospital, from the moment they encounter that first masked paramedic, they will never see a human face again. Not one smile, nor pair of cheeks, nor lips, nor chin. Not a single human being without barricades of plastic. Sometimes, my stomach twists at the thought that to the patients whose faces I can never unsee – contorting and buckling with the effort of breathing – I am no more than a pair of eyes, a thin strip of flesh between mask and visor, a muffled voice that strains and cracks behind plastic.

Of all Covid’s cruelties, surely the greatest is this? That it cleaves us from each other at precisely those times when we need human contact the most. That it spreads through speech and touch – the very means through which we share our love, tenderness and basic humanity. That it transforms us unwittingly into vectors of fatality. And that those we love most – and with whom we are most intimate – are the ones we endanger above all others.

It’s late January. The wards and ICUs are overwhelmed, awash with the virus. The patients seem younger, the new variant more virulent. We are drowning, drowning in Covid. The sight of a doctor or nurse breaking down has become unremarkable. Too close, for too long, to too many patients’ pain, we have become – just like them – saturated. Behind hospital doors, tucked away out of sight, we seem to suffer as one.

Outside, on the other hand, the virus has once again carved up the country into simmering, resentful, aggrieved little units. It’s too old, too cold to be doing this again. One way or another, lockdown hurts us all. But instead of unity, community and a shared sense of purpose – that extraordinary eruption of philanthropy last springtime – we seethe like rats in a sack, fractious, divided.
One morning, on the way to work, the politicians and the trolls and the suffering and the death become too much. All of a sudden, I’m unable to drive

During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I’ve been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren’t empty. Last night a charming “Covid sceptic” sent me this: “You are paid to lie and a disgrace to your profession. You have clearly sold your soul and are nothing more than a child abuser destroying futures. I do not consent to your satanic ways.” A friend, herself an intensive care doctor, has just been told by another male “sceptic” that he intends to sexually abuse her until she requires one of her own ventilators. And this morning, another colleague, also female, was told: “You evil criminal lying piece of government shit. You need to be executed immediately for treason and genocide.”

In short, we have reached the point in the pandemic where what feels like armies of trolls do their snarling, misogynistic utmost to silence NHS staff who try to convey what it’s like on the inside. Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant “Covid is a hoax” outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them.

‘Human kindness will not be locked down’ … people clap as a funeral cortege passes through Glencoe, Scotland. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

I well understand why they want to gag us. Our testimony makes Covid denial a tall order. We bear witness not to statistics but to human beings. Our language is flesh and blood. This patient, and then this patient, and then another. The pregnant woman in her 20s on ICU, intubated and lifeless. The three generations of one family on ventilators, each of them dying one after the other. We humanise, empathise, turn the unfathomable dimensions of the 100,000 dead into mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Increasingly, speaking out feels like a moral imperative. Because perhaps – if we can only disprove enough untruths, if we can just slow the onslaught of disinformation – we may have fewer dying hands to hold in the future.

Please don’t flinch. Please don’t look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospitals needs telling. To dispel a few prime ministerial press conference myths, the NHS is not “close to” or “on the brink of” being overwhelmed. We are here and now in the midst of calamity. The Covid patients keep on coming, so unnervingly unwell, and we race to find space for them. But all the spare staff have already been snatched from their day jobs. Elective surgery has shut down, everything inessential postponed. ICUs are filled with obstetricians, paediatricians, psychiatrists and surgeons doing their amateur best to support the small pool of staff with proper expertise. On wards across the country, where Covid patients live and die in their thousands, the medics are stretched perilously thinly. And still the new admissions come.

This week, a doctor friend in another trust sent me this, having been newly redeployed to her hospital’s ICU: “The situation at work is just dreadful. Once I’ve donned PPE and gone into ICU, hours and hours go by. And it’s just awful in there. It’s not calm like the news videos, it’s chaotic with alarms going constantly, patients being intubated and proned. Most of us are NOT trained to do this or deal with this. We are surgeons, anaesthetists, physicians, nurses, HCAs, porters etc. We are NOT ICU staff.”
It did not have to be like this. None of these horrors were inevitable

Newly qualified doctors with scarcely six months’ experience sometimes struggle singlehanded on the Covid wards at night, their seniors unable to leave crashing patients elsewhere. Whoever deteriorates overnight may live or die according to whether a bed can be found on ICU. This is rationing, without being named out loud as such. An unacknowledged peacetime form of battlefield triage: lives being lost because there aren’t enough staff to go around. No one here is being “protected”, not the patients, not the nurses, not the doctors, not the families, and certainly not the NHS writ large.

Sometimes, colleagues confess that they feel suicidal. Sometimes, in the darkness, a patient pleads to die. They cannot take the claustrophobic roar of their CPAP mask any longer. The struggle to breathe is costing them more than they can bear. A student I used to teach looks close to collapse. “I feel as if it might be my fault when they die,” he tells me in a monotone. “If I’d been a doctor for longer, I might know how to do something different. Maybe it’s me – maybe I’m not cut out to be a doctor.” I watch him wrestle to keep his tears at bay, unable even to reach out to give him a hug. The wrongness of it all constricts my chest until it hurts. He’s too young, too green to be standing here like this, accusing himself of failing the pandemic dead, who themselves have been failed by so many in power above. At what cost do these night shifts worm into his soul?

The truth is, patients of necessity are falling through our cracks. We cannot hold them all, we’re too few and too ground down. Rationing does not declare itself in a fanfare of noise. It sidles in, bit by bit, as the Covid cases rise. Intensive care nurses, used to working with a concentration of one nurse per patient, are asked to stretch themselves across four patients or more. Standards start to slip as battered, shell-shocked staff do their brave and hopeless best against the ever-surging human tide. The truth – and don’t we know it, if we’re honest? – is that doctors and nurses are neither angels nor heroes. We’re human. Merely human. We can only do so much.

An anti-lockdown demonstration in Edinburgh in January. 

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still. I feel sick. I want to scream. Something monstrous, like cancer, is twisting in my chest. One morning, on the way to work, the politicians and the trolls and the suffering and the death become too much. All of a sudden, I’m unable to drive. In a layby I cringe, doubled up, fighting for breath. My body is in mutiny, it’s overruled my head. You clench your teeth, wipe your cheeks, turn the ignition, set off again. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

A unity of sorts emerges with the stupefying news that in Britain, an island, the cumulative Covid death toll has surpassed 100,000. On the same day, we learn that our death rate per head of population is the highest in the world. As the country reels from these calamitous statistics, the prime minister insists that his government “truly did everything we could to minimise loss of life”. Yet a quarter of those deaths have occurred in 2021 – during the last four weeks alone – making Boris Johnson’s words a patent lie. He didn’t lock down promptly, he didn’t close our borders, he didn’t protect care homes, he allowed tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable residents to die. And then, instead of future-proofing Britain from a second surge last summer, he offered bribes for social mixing. But our eating out, far from helping out, sent Covid cases ticking hungrily upwards.

Dr Rachel Clarke. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

This second wave has been turbocharged by Downing Street’s procrastination. Putting off lockdown until the eleventh hour has – yet again – wreaked havoc. Urgent cancer surgeries should not be postponed. Covid patients should not be calling Ubers to rush them to hospital because the ambulances they need are nowhere to be found. Doctors and nurses should not be suicidal with stress, nor tended by their own as they suffocate and die on ventilators. It did not have to be like this. None of these horrors were inevitable.

Every single day at work, I see more kindness, more sweetness, more compassion than you could ever, ever imagine

How – from where – can we find cause for hope when our political leaders, despite a track record like this, insist they’ve behaved infallibly? Well, by early spring, the country’s most vulnerable citizens should be vaccinated, a prospect that makes me ecstatic. And lockdown has already sent new cases plummeting downwards. The deaths, we know, will follow. Momentum too is building towards a zero Covid strategy – the complete elimination of the virus – as demonstrated so successfully by countries such as New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam.

But my main reasons for optimism lie closer to home, flickering and sparking amid the darkness. I turn my gaze from the dizzying statistics and look instead to the human beings around me. Their ingenuity and kindness give me the steel to go on. One day, for example, a peculiar procession outside the hospital turns heads on the high street. It is led by a strangely immaculate tractor, freshly waxed and wreathed with flowers, gleaming beneath the winter sun. The tractor is destined for a nearby village, hauling an agricultural trailer on which a coffin has been laid. Several cars follow, their stern-faced drivers dressed in black. It’s the funeral cortege of a larger-than-life farmer, known to all in his village and far beyond. Pre-Covid, hundreds of locals would have packed into the village church, eager to pay tribute to a man much loved. Now though, a virus dictates our forms of mourning. No large gatherings are allowed.

When the tractor arrives in the village, lumbering slowly towards the empty church, something magical and startling begins to unfold. Word of mouth and social media have told the neighbours when the cortege will pass and now, on their doorsteps and in porches, behind their gates, on garden paths, they assemble at a respectful social distance. As the tractor passes, so begins the applause. First a ripple, then a clatter, then a thunder, then a roar. In physical estrangement, a population finds its voice. This community, unbowed, celebrates a man they loved – and how. My heart lifts. I feel hope flicker. For however bleak the times, however grim our prospects seem, human kindness finds a shape and form: it will not be locked down.

All across the hospital, you see it. In the tiny crocheted crimson hearts, made by locals for patients and delivered in their scores so that no one feels alone. In the piles of donated pizzas, devoured at night by ravenous staff. In the homemade scrubs, whipped up by an unstoppable army of self-isolating grandmothers whose choice in fabrics is fearlessly floral. In the nurses and carers and porters and cleaners who keep on, despite everything, smiling. I may be tired and angry and sometimes mad with grief, but every single day at work, I see more kindness, more sweetness, more compassion, more courage, more resilience, more steel, more diamond-plated love than you could ever, ever imagine. And this means more and lasts more than anything else, and it cannot be stolen by Covid.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Dr Rachel Clarke is published by Little, Brown

Why Donald Trump was the ultimate anarchist

The former president is being tried for his role in inciting anarchy but anarchia, in the Greek sense of “vacant office”, characterised his entire term.

BY MELISSA LANE
8 FEBRUARY 2021

Trump support inside the Capitol in Washington, DC on 6 January
PHOTO BY BRENT STIRTON/GETTY IMAGES

On 13 January, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump for a second time in just over a year, making Trump the first American president to be impeached twice. The House resolution focused upon Trump’s “incitement of insurrection” during a speech delivered to a crowd of his supporters on 6 January, some of whom later stormed the Capitol where Congress was meeting to certify the election results. The resolution argued that by such conduct Trump “betrayed his trust as president”.

“Democracy suddenly gave way to political anarchy”, the Washington Post wrote on the evening of 6 January. The theme was echoed in the British press, which converged on the headlines “Anarchy in the US” (Metro) and “Anarchy in the USA” (the i and the Daily Express).

Most of this coverage associated “anarchy” with the violence and lawlessness that characterised the Capitol riots, as a direct result of which five people died, including one Capitol Police officer. Yet there is a sense in which Trump not only incited anarchy during this violent finale to his presidency, but acted as an anarchist par excellence during his entire tenure in office, embodying what an ancient Greek observer would have called “anarchia”.

The Greek word anarchia literally means a vacant office: the absence of an officeholder. It was also used to describe an officeholder who undermines the constitutional order on which their own office, and the rule of law, depends. In fact, anarchia was often used to describe an officeholder – usually retrospectively – as having been no proper officeholder at all.

While violence might be unleashed by a vacant office or a vacuum of accountable power, it’s striking that a number of Greek authors, from Aeschylus to Isocrates, contrasted anarchia with tyrannis, or “tyranny”. This means anarchy is not just another word for the tyrannical or authoritarian abuse of power, or “lawless” conduct. It is a condition in which the very basis of political office has been undermined.

Explaining how a democracy might degenerate in the Republic, Plato tied the idea of anarchia (using the related adjective anarchos) to the actions and attitudes of both citizens and officeholders. Like those who stormed the Capitol, the citizens of a degenerating democratic constitution in Plato’s narrative come to believe that “there is no necessity…to be governed, unless you like [to be]”. Plato’s Socrates claims that these members of a failing democracy are influenced by distorted civic values which redescribe “anarchy” as “freedom”; he sums up the democratic constitution as being anarchos.

Plato cannot literally mean here that no one has been installed in office: democracies in ancient Greece chose many officials, both by lot and by election, and the same is true of the democracy described in the Republic. Rather, the point of linking democracy to anarchia is to suggest that democracy involves no meaningful and enforceable requirement either for citizens to obey officeholders, or for officeholders to use their powers as intended.

On this view, it is possible for the duties and legal entitlements of a democratic office to be hollowed out in spirit, even if formally followed in practice. Here democracy risks becoming a kind of shadow play in which people are chosen for office and nominally claim to hold it, but in so doing violate the most basic expectations of that office and thereby undermine its effectiveness and power.

The latest article of impeachment charges Trump with having acted “in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law”. Following the ancient Greeks, the underlying idea can be taken further. By “betray[ing] his trust as president” as flagrantly as he did, Trump should be counted as an anarchist: ie, as having been no real officeholder at all.

Trump’s effective abdication of office can be seen in many of his acts before the November election and his efforts to reject and undo its results. It is most egregious in cases in which his conduct undermined the very conditions of political office, just as Greeks fearing anarchia would have expected.

Consider Trump’s pardoning of former sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona. Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for continuing to detain people based solely on suspicion of their being unauthorised immigrants, in defiance of an order of a federal district judge. By pardoning not just someone guilty of criminal conduct, but specifically an official who had been held in contempt of court, Trump undermined the fundamental democratic and constitutional principle that, as John McCain put it in the wake of Arpaio’s pardon, “No one is above the law.”

Worse still was Trump’s refusal to abide by a court order that the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, “should be removed from his position because he was performing his duties illegally”, having been appointed in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. The judge in the case ruled that because Pendley “had served unlawfully for 424 days as acting director of the bureau”, it followed that his acts in that role “would have no force and effect and must be set aside as arbitrary and capricious”. By refusing to remove Pendley, Trump again shirked the duties of his office. But this refusal went further insofar as it undermined the legitimacy of the acts of the bureau as well.

In the end, Trump’s “incitement of insurrection”, combined with his consistent failure to live up to the obligations of the presidency, show that he was no proper office holder at all. Despite his claim to be “the only thing standing between the American Dream and total anarchy”, it is clear that Trump was the real anarchist all along.

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 professor of politics and the Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is the author of Greek and Roman Political Ideas.

This article is part of the Agora series, a collaboration between the New Statesman and Aaron James Wendland, senior research fellow in Philosophy at Massey College, Toronto. He tweets at @aj_wendland

 DELHI NEWS

'Anarchy can't be tolerated': Delhi High Court on sanitation workers’ strike

New Delhi: MCD sanitation workers shout slogans during a protest against AAP government, demanding to clear their outstanding remuneration, outside Delhi CM's residence in New Delhi, Friday, Dec. 18, 2020. (PTI Photo)(PTI18-12-2020_000079A)(PTI)

The strike by sanitation workers of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC), which began on January 15 demanding the payments of salaries pending since December 2020, was called off on Thursday, after the EDMC cleared all dues.

By Richa banka, New Delhi

PUBLISHED ON FEB 06, 2021 02:36 AM IST

The Delhi high court on Friday came down heavily on sanitation worker unions that were on a strike, and said their “anarchy” of obstructing the regular work of cleaning and dumping garbage on streets cannot be allowed to prevail in a civilised society.

The strike by sanitation workers of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC), which began on January 15 demanding the payments of salaries pending since December 2020, was called off on Thursday, after the EDMC cleared all dues.

EDMC mayor Nirmal Jain confirmed the development and said the civic body has been in talks with the sanitation workers’ union for the past one week.

“I’m yet to go through the detailed court order, but sanitation workers are like a family and no action would be taken against them,” he said.

A bench of justice Vipin Sanghi and justice Rekha Palli said the strike by sanitation workers is “being fuelled and driven by political consideration”. “Political leaders do not understand that they should have a commonality in their thinking. That has been breached and we are not naming any one party. This is very dangerous and has to be stopped. We will direct the police commissioner to take action,” the court said.

The bench was hearing a plea by EDMC, seeking action against “miscreants” who were “illegally waylaying garbage removal trucks, threatening drivers and dumping garbage openly on the roads and streets”.

It also cautioned the sanitation worker unions against taking law into their hands and directed the commissioner of the civic body to take disciplinary action against erring workers.

EDMC, through its standing counsel Manu Chaturvedi, told the court that unions were protesting despite their salaries being cleared till December 2020. He said salaries for January 2021 are being processed.

Two unions—MCD Swacchta Karamchaari Union and All Municipal Corporations Staff Union—represented by advocate Jivesh Kumar Tiwari, told the court that all nine unions are ending their strike and want their grievances to be heard.

“We have withdrawn our strike and our nine unions are getting back to work tomorrow (Saturday). Our petition has been allowed just five minutes ago when this matter is being heard and we are ready to sort out our differences,” Tiwari said.

The court replied, “We are happy to hear this…However, we are observing that if the MCD employees have any grievance and resort to a legal strike, that does not entitle them to take law into their hands and create anarchy”.

Bitcoin, once the domain of geeks and anarchists, now backstopped by central banks' easy-money policies

The profile of people entering into Bitcoin has definitely changed

Financial Times
Eva Szalay
Publishing date:Feb 04, 2021 •

Bitcoin briefly wobbled after reaching a high in early January, but has so far avoided a repeat of the brutal crash in 2017. 

PHOTO BY DADO RUVIC/REUTERS ILLUSTRATION

A flood of central bank stimulus and widening interest among retail and institutional investors has sustained the rally in cryptocurrencies, analysts say, even as skeptics warn that the market is in the midst of a bubble.

Bitcoin kicked off February at just above US$36,000, about US$5,000 beneath the all-time peak it hit last month.


The digital currency briefly wobbled after reaching the high in early January, but has so far avoided a repeat of the brutal crash in 2017. Some investors put that down to a deluge of central bank stimulus, which has inflated the price of assets globally and triggered a frantic hunt for returns.

“The amount of liquidity that has been injected in the system has found its way into a lot of different assets, including alternatives such as Bitcoin,” said Francesca Fornasari, a fund manager at Insight Investment.

At the same time, professional and amateur investors are beginning to play a more active role in the crypto market.

The amount of liquidity that has been injected in the system has found its way into a lot of different assets, including alternatives such as Bitcoin

FRANCESCA FORNASARI, FUND MANAGER, INSIGHT INVESTMENT

“In 2012 it was mostly geeks, anarchists and libertarians in crypto,” said Marc Bernegger, a Zurich-based board member of Crypto Finance Group, a broker and asset manager. “The profile of people entering into Bitcoin has definitely changed.”

Many remain skeptical, however, and worry that the sharp price rises reflect increasingly frothy market conditions. For them, Bitcoin’s gains echo the recent volatility in share prices of companies like GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings, as well as a sudden surge this week in the price of silver.

The moves in all three markets involved an influx of retail traders, armed with increasingly sophisticated tools and often stuck at home because of coronavirus lockdowns. Some brokerages such as Robinhood allow traders to bet both on the price of stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Since a sharp fall during the broad market ructions last March, Bitcoin’s value has increased by nine times. The boom has caused parts of the traditional financial community to take notice, with some banks beginning to cover the market as part of their research offerings.

San Francisco-based Coinbase is preparing for a direct listing that would give investors their first chance to buy shares in a big U.S.-listed cryptocurrency exchange.

Coinbase’s offices in San Francisco, California. 

PHOTO BY MICHAEL SHORT/BLOOMBERG FILES

The planned debut comes as investors are already chasing other proxies for investing in digital tokens without having to hold them outright. Last year, investors poured US$5.7-billion into cryptocurrency trusts managed by Grayscale, the favoured investment channel of many traditional traders dipping their toes into Bitcoin. The figure amounted to more than four times the total net inflows between 2013 and 2019. Most of Grayscale’s inflows come from institutional investors.

Data from Chainalysis, a specialist cryptocurrency analytics company, also show an increase in institutions’ purchases of Bitcoin, and a rise in average transaction sizes since November.

Joshua Younger, a strategist at JPMorgan, said the size of the Bitcoin market had grown to equal about a fifth of gold held for investment and trading purposes, with a market capitalization for the cryptocurrency of US$750-billion at its peak earlier this year, meaning it “is far from a niche asset class.”

The lure of the high-risk space is increasingly difficult to ignore. “You’re not buying Bitcoin to make 20 per cent, you’re buying it to make exponential returns,” said Brett Messing, a partner and chief operating officer of cryptocurrency specialist hedge fund SkyBridge Capital.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

Quebec’s Bitfarms rallies as Bitcoin soars, but concerns grow over cryptominers’ massive electricity needs

Analysts at Canadian insurance company Manulife said in late January that the expansion in central banks’ balance sheets and rising public debt would push investors further into alternative asset classes, which could turn cryptocurrencies into “a solution to investor fears that ongoing extraordinary policy support could lead to resource misallocation.”

“This doesn’t necessarily imply that investments in cryptocurrencies are appropriate, but it does suggest that cryptoassets such as Bitcoin will increasingly become a standard point of reference for investors and policymakers alike,” Manulife said.

But scams and hacks also remain rife, with a recent report from data company Xangle showing that investors have lost more than US$16 billion to fraud since 2012. Regulators are also increasingly concerned about the size of the market and the unchecked activity taking place every day.

Agustín Carstens, the head of the Bank for International Settlements said last week that “it is clear that Bitcoin is more of a speculative asset than money.”

Michael Bolliger, chief investment officer at UBS Wealth Management, added that the history of bubbles showed that they could stay inflated for longer than most expected, sometimes without bursting.

“Changes in the way assets are perceived can also mean that bubbles may never fully deflate, and this could hold true for cryptocurrencies, too,” Bolliger said.

© 2021 The Financial Times Ltd

An olympian leap of faith


As he plunges into the world of the biggest sporting stage, the Olympics, designer Suket Dhir’s latest collection, Leap, stays true to his surrealist roots.

Published: 07th February 2021 

By Medha Dutta Yadav
Express News Service

Eclectic is the word that comes to mind when you think of designer Suket Dhir. He, of the whimsical colour palette, the zany bomber jackets and the unique dhoti-bandhgala combo (created for Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee). Keeping true to his oeuvre, Dhir’s latest collection—showcased at Ogaan—is as evocative as ever. Where earlier, he drew from Mughal and Pahadi miniatures to come up with a line that had rajas playing golf and ranis taking selfies, the present collection, Leap, is an ode to the Olympics—the games, the city of Gods, the players, the spectators, et al. “The concept of this collection is ‘forever young’ and named Leap, it’s like leaping into a new year, after a kind of a blip of a year,” laughs Dhir.

Versatile and effortless, the collection is inspired by comic prints. So, you have the trademark bomber jacket with swimmers and divers. There are the javelin throwers, cyclists, discus throwers. Not to mention, sumo wrestlers and gymnasts. There is a surreal mish-mash as all jostle for space on the canvas that Dhir creates. While the outer side filled with this vibrant graffiti-of-sorts catches your eye, turn the lapel and you find the quintessential Dhir stamp—the lining is equally attractive, making it possible to wear the bomber jacket inside out. While this theme runs through almost all his collection—even the earlier ones have a brighter lining letting the wearer own a secretive world from the inside—it’s only the bomber jackets that are reversible.

Suket Dhir

Going through his recent collections—especially those inspired by Mughal and Pahadi miniatures and now Leap—one can almost notice a thread of surrealism connecting them. It’s like looking at a Salvadore Dali canvas, but maybe not that macabre. Dhir doesn’t deny it. Highly influenced by surrealism, he counts among his major influences Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte and his most famous work, the Son of Man, which makes its own presence felt in every creation in a completely metamorphosed avatar.

Celebrated for his ability to put together a vast palette of colours, it was not very long ago that Dhir was more at home with muted shades—think indigo, blues and greys. “I thought putting too much colour together would not work. But look at the collection now. I’m confident that I can put in almost everything and still make it look great,” he says with a tinge of pride.

Immensely influenced by the impeccable style of his grandfather—from whom he inherited some heirloom jackets—it was natural for him to be drawn exclusively to men’s fashion. Women’s fashion was not on the agenda and came much later. Even his line for women is uncharacteristically named, He for She—clothes for women with a distinct masculine silhouette.

“My wife would keep stealing clothes out of my wardrobe. Finally, one day I just woke up and thought let me design a collection for her, and so the collection for women came about,” says the designer, who believes that clothes should be designed in a way so as to transform a person according to their mood. “It’s the wearer who should define how the garment looks,” says Dhir, who pushes for slow fashion and owning the timeless look.

This International Woolmark Prize-winner, who developed a supple and breathable wool ikat fabric with the help of weavers in Telangana and West Bengal, believes that every fashion era—good, bad, ugly—leaves behind its own imprint and learnings. “I would not want the 80s fashion scene to return. But then again, I don’t want to wish that away either. After all, had that not happened, what would you laugh at? What would you know not to do?” Indeed.

Salvador Dalí exhibit to reopen by reservation Feb. 10

Biggs Museum of American Art announced there is still time to see the exhibition Stairway to Heaven: Life and Death in the Visions of Salvador Dalí, featuring illustrations for “Les Chants de Maldoror” and “The Divine Comedy.”

Doors will be open for reservations from the general public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday to Sunday, starting Wednesday, Feb. 10. Due to high demand, the Dalí exhibition has been extended through Saturday, Feb. 20.

Salvador Dalí (1904-89) is among the most recognized and eccentric artists of the 20th century. Created for two publications, “Les Chants de Maldoror” and “The Divine Comedy,” the artworks in this exhibition signal two distinct periods in Dalí’s career: the hedonism of his youth and the redemption he sought later in life. These two sets of artworks also signal his transition from surrealism to mysticism, which can be seen in this exhibition through his unwavering technical mastery in printmaking and draftsmanship.

With nearly 150 individual artworks on view, this exhibition provides an expansive selection to interpret Dalí‘s dreamlike subjects.

For those who cannot visit in person, free walk-through tours of the exhibition are available online at biggsmuseum.org.

Internet users are the new surrealists, 

and they keep changing the world

5 February 2021

As 2021 continues to progress at a dizzying rate, one of the recurring social phenomenon we’re seeing is the surreal eruption of online activism in the real world. From the recent explosion of GameStop share prices – hiked up by amateur investors co-ordinating online – to the large-scale protests and riots in Washington following the 2020 Presidential election, the communities in cyberspace continue to spill out into the real world. The question is: why are these kinds of actions becoming an increasingly unsettling occurrence in the usual running of society?


In the lexicon of web-design, the term UX, user experience, is often used to describe how an individual may interact with a product, specifically a webpage. Its principle idea is that how we use any webpage is guided by the impetus of its designer, expressed in the shapes and details of the virtual space. When extrapolated to the internet as a whole, there is of course no single designer, certain principles and codes might organise the webpages present into certain general categories, but every website has a different way of connecting to the user. This apparent individuality can be considered the over-arching trend across these different spaces. Each forum, blog, Twitter feed and YouTube channel provides users with the ability to culture their own perfect information eco-system.

We’ve all heard of ‘echo-chambers’ by now, blaming the algorithms behind social-media sites for creating bubbles of like-minded people and limiting their contact with a wider reality, but this isn’t what a generalised UX is getting at. Rather, this problem of social cohesion – brought about by people bringing their outlandish internet-nourished ideas about the world back into it – stems from an endemic property to the experience of the world wide web. The internet has democratised the consumption of information, giving users an almost complete control over how the world appears to them and what parts of it they can interact with; an emergent philosophy that finds its historical roots in a 20th century artistic movement.


The reclusive artist Joseph Cornell produced the majority of his work in the 1940s through to the 60s, though has since been regularly identified with the surrealists. Taking the free-form approach to art adopted by those involved, Cornell built small wooden boxes, which he would decorate and fill with objects collected from antiques stalls around New York. The works were obsessive, and meticulously constructed, with each material picked out of a large hoard that Cornell kept in his mother’s house, which he had affectionately nicknamed ‘Utopia Pathway’. The term ‘sur-real’ was coined by the poet Apollinaire in 1917, as a portmanteau of the French for ‘beyond’ and ‘reality’, and distinctly embodies Cornell’s work. He exercised complete, borderline neurotic, control of his boxes, as bracketed realities he had made for himself; famously shy, he was also known for rarely leaving his home, and choosing instead to tinker at his superior worlds from the basement.

To the modern reader, his lifestyle might not appear so different from those endlessly scanning forums dedicated to conspiracy theories and alternate narratives about the world; picking out specific facts and details to build a virtual iteration of Cornell’s boxes. Even the plastic edges of the computer display resemble the wooden frames that Cornell used to emphasise the difference between his assemblages and wider reality. Using the internet is then a process of constant collage, of information and data, shaped by the eccentric whims of the person behind the keyboard.

This is the almost theological component to the endeavour, of exercising choice over what the world appears as. Perhaps the world isn’t good enough for you; the internet can provide the alternative. Morality means nothing in this space, as neither it did to the surrealists. Dali’s sadistic cookbook is testament enough to this notion, tantamount to the overflowing cultivation of violence that can be found online, in its gruesome overlapping between butchered sea-life and sexualised female figures – or what’s left of them. In other words, it is a complete retreat from social and physical reality, where the individual can believe themselves as powerful as a lucid dreamer, and where political authority cannot penetrate. It may perhaps be no wonder that when these ‘dreamers’ return to the world their behaviour often collapses into violence.

In the transition from the power found online to the political impotence of the physical world, feelings of frustration are entirely predictable. Returning to reality from the internet is a constraint on an individual’s freedom to control the information they encounter, unlike when they’re grasping at the mouse. Suddenly, actions have measurable consequences. On a basic level, we can even equate this to the nominal costs for information online and the price of a newspaper in the local corner-shop; when desire is concerned, the physical world is the place of total frustration to the internet’s surreal freedom.

All of this is not to suggest that these frustrated users returning from online space are totally determined by such interactions. Indeed, culpability ultimately rests on their shoulders for how they behave once they return to the world, but it also seems well worth interrogating the way the internet encourages political frustration. This has been the standard establishment response, who have attempted to control media to limit individual desires. The surreal element of our experience with the internet is forcing a continual conflict between social management under the guise of morality, with the idealistic impulses of individual actors. As to who should be the victor, that can only be decided by how we respond.

WRITTEN BY Jasper Spires

Apocalypse Then

Pandemics and labour: COVID-19 isn't the first time there's been upheaval at work

COVID-19 is not the first time the labour market has undergone dramatic change


Ainsley Hawthorn · For CBC N.L. · Posted: Feb 06, 2021 

A medieval illustration from the Queen Mary Psalter (ca. 1310-20) shows three men harvesting grain while an overseer stands behind them with a rod. (Public domain)

Over the past year, COVID-19 has unexpectedly sparked a public conversation about labour, working conditions and fair pay.

The designation of "essential workers" during lockdowns made it clear how reliant we are as a society not only on first responders and health professionals, but on often-undervalued workers, like retail clerks and cleaning staff.

Temporary pay increases for front-line employees during lockdown periods, instead of creating widespread goodwill for the grocery stores and other companies that instituted them, have drawn attention to how inadequate the income of most front-line workers really is.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, this rollback of "hero pay" preceded Dominion grocery store staff going on strike for 12 weeks. The strike ended with a collective agreement that contained only marginal pay increases.

Pandemics often change labour conditions and affect the way societies value their workers.

From 1347, when it infiltrated the Crimea, until it burnt itself out in 1353, the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe's population. In cities like London, bodies were piled five deep in mass graves.

Despite the devastation, most places returned to a type of normalcy relatively quickly. The plague did its worst damage within a few months, and life typically resumed its usual routine by the following year.
Forging ahead, somehow

What choice did survivors have but to forge ahead? Crops had to be sown and harvested, livestock had to be tended, clothing had to be made and mended, and city infrastructure had to be maintained.

All of a sudden, though, the number of people available to work had plummeted, a fact that would irrevocably change Europe's economic landscape.

The radical cleric John Ball, on horseback, fires up a group of rebels during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. From an illustrated manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chronicles. (Public domain)

Before the Black Death, peasants and labourers had very little bargaining power. After centuries of population increase, there was intense competition for what work was available.

Many lower-class people were bound to a landholder as serfs. In exchange for cultivating the land they occupied, serfs owed services or rent to their landlord. They often had no right to leave the land they lived on and could sometimes be sold along with the land itself.

As is the case with most pandemics, the lower classes were most severely affected by the Black Death. The mortality rate for English peasants seems to have been more than 50 per cent, while the death toll for landowners was closer to 27 per cent.

The peasants who survived the ravages of the plague soon realized they had the upper hand in the post-plague economy. The high mortality in their ranks had created an extreme labour shortage. Villages had emptied out, fields were overgrown, and livestock roamed the countryside.

Migrating for the best work conditions

Labourers could now set their own terms, and they began moving from place to place in search of the most lucrative offers.

Wages for lower-class workers rose drastically. In Oxfordshire; a plowman who had earned two shillings per week before the plague could command 10 shillings per week afterward. Pay rates for artisans increased, too. In Paris, wages for masons quadrupled between 1351 and 1355.

Peasants reap and rake hay in an illumination by the Limbourg brothers from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, circa 1412-16. (Public domain)

The new mobility and clout of the peasantry was terrifying for the upper classes, since most aristocrats were reliant on cheap labour. They made their money from the cultivation of the land they owned, and the wage hikes cut into their income.

To satisfy the unhappy elites, governments enacted legislation aimed at controlling wages. England passed an Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 and a Statute of Labourers in 1351, designed to cap wages at pre-plague levels and prevent peasants from moving around in search of better working conditions.

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Places like France, Castille, and Florence also announced wage freezes, limiting remuneration for everyone from stable boys and wet nurses to soldiers and notaries.

'Malice of employees'

The wording of some of these laws reveals how much the aristocracy resented the newfound economic power of the lower classes. The Statute of Labourers rails against "the malice of employees, who were idle and were not willing to take employment after the pestilence unless for outrageous wages."

Ultimately, these regulations had little effect. Labour was in such short supply that landlords and other employers couldn't afford to ignore market conditions.

French peasants wielding farm implements revolt in an illustration from a manuscript of Jean Froissart's Chronicles. (Public domain)

In fact, as workers became more independent and financially stable, they began to agitate for even more rights, culminating in popular rebellions at the end of the century.

In the 1378 Ciompi Revolt in Florence, artisans pressed for greater guild protections and political representation, while, in the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, protesters demanded lower taxes and an end to serfdom.

In the end, the 150 years after the Black Death were a golden age for medieval workers.

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More people bought their own land, labourers earned higher incomes, and the feudal system that had kept peasants under the thumb of wealthy landowners for centuries declined and eventually vanished.

We're not facing the same astronomical mortality and precipitous population decline that medieval Europeans did during the Black Death.

Still, COVID-19 may put a premium on jobs that are now considered more dangerous or more essential than they were before the pandemic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ainsley Hawthorn, PhD, is a cultural historian and author who lives in St. John’s. Follow Ainsley on Facebook

The Peasant War in Germany by Frederick Engels 1850

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The Peasants War in Germany, 1525-1526 - Libcom.org

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